Film
The years immediately following WWII saw the release of two of the most popular Christmas films in US history: It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Moviefone listed the two movies as number two and three respectively in their "25 Best Christmas Movies of All Time". The Times of London, in a similar ranking, had the two in tenth and eight respectively, while placing fourth 1942's Holiday Inn, the movie that launched Bing Crosby's White Christmas. Particularly Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart has been called "a testament to the family values of small-town America just after WWII."
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) regularly appears on lists of the worst films ever made. Paul Jacobson, the film's producer and a former unit manager for the television program, Howdy Doody, described his film as a "Yuletide science fiction fantasy", and with the best of intentions, hoped to bring something to movie theaters at a time of the year when there was a paucity of children's entertainment other than the annual Disney feature. In Jacobson's film, Martians kidnap Santa Claus in a plan to bring fun to their listless, TV-obsessed children. Once on Mars, Santa mass-produces toys using a computerized machine, foils a sourpuss saboteur, and generates fun for all. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians has been novelized, adapted to musical stagings, and has taken its place as a holiday cult classic. Child actress Pia Zadora played one of the Martian children and years later commented, "It was very well done, considering it was shot twenty years ago - gimme a break - and really is very entertaining. It's become a Christmas classic, really."
Read more about this topic: Christmas In The Post-War United States
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
—Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918)
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)